Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York by Paul Gallico Page B

but forbore to explain.
    And in this manner, Mrs Harris lost all fear of the great foreign capital, for they showed her a life and a city teeming with her own kind of people - simple, rough, realistic, and hard-working, and engaged all of them in the same kind of struggle to get along as she herself back home.

F REE to wander where she would during the day in Paris except for her fittings, Mrs Harris never quite knew where her footsteps would lead her. It was not the glittering shopping sections of the Champs Élysées, the Faubourg St Honoré, and the Place Vendôme that interested her, for there were equally shimmering and expensive shopping sections in London which she never visited. But she loved people and odd
quartiers
, the beautiful parks, the river, and the manner in which life was lived in the poorer section by the inhabitants of the city.
    She explored thus the Left Bank and the Right and eventually through accident stumbled upon a certain paradise in the Middle, the Flower Market located by the Quai de la Corse on the Île de la Cité.
    Often back home Mrs Harris had peered longingly into the windows of flower shops, at the display of hot-house blooms, orchids, roses, gardenias, etc., on her way to and from her labours, but never in her life had she found herself in the midst of such an intoxicating profusion of blossomsof every kind, colour, and shape, ranged upon the footpaths and filling stalls and stands of the Flower Market within sight of the twin towers of Notre-Dame.
    Here were streets that were nothing but a mass of azaleas in pots, plants in pink, white, red, purple, mingling with huge bunches of cream, crimson, and yellow carnations. There seemed to be acres of boxes of pansies smiling up into the sun, blue irises, red roses, and huge fronds of gladioli forced into early bud in hot-houses.
    There were many plants and flowers Mrs Harris did not even know the name of, small rubbery-looking pink blooms, or flowers with yellow centres and deep blue petals, every conceivable kind of daisy and marguerite, bushy-headed peonies and, of course, row upon row of Mrs Harris’s own very dearest potted geraniums.
    But not only were her visual senses enthralled and overwhelmed by the masses of shapes and colours, but on the soft breeze that blew from the Seine came as well the intoxication of scent to transport the true lover of flowers into his or her particular heaven, and such a one was Mrs Harris. All the beauty that she had ever really known in her life until she saw the Dior dress had been flowers. Now, her nostrils were filled with the scent of lilies and tuberoses. From every quarter came beautiful scents, and through this profusion of colour and scent Mrs Harris wandered as if in a dream.
    Yet another familiar figure was promenading in that same dream, none other than the fierce old gentleman who had been Mrs Harris’s neighbour at the Dior show and whose name was the Marquis de Chassagne, of an ancient family. He was wearing a light brown spring coat, a brown homburg, and fawn-coloured gloves. There was no fierceness in his face now and even his tufted wild-flung eyebrows seemed at peace as he strolled through the lanes of fresh, dewyblossoms and breathed deeply and with satisfaction of the perfumes that mounted from them.
    His path crossed that of the charwoman, a smile broke out over his countenance, and he raised his homburg with the same gesture he would have employed doffing it to a queen. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘our neighbour from London who likes flowers. So you have found your way here.’
    Mrs Harris said: ‘It’s like a bit of ’eaven, ain’t it? I wouldn’t have believed it if I ’adn’t seen it with me own eyes.’ She looked down at a huge jar bulging with crisp white lilies and another with firm, smooth, yet unopened gladioli with but a gleam of mauve, crimson, lemon, or pink showing at the stalks to indicate what colours they would be. Drops of fresh water glistened on them. ‘Oh,